Hop Alley

by Scott Phillips

  Copyright © 2014 Scott Phillips

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Phillips, Scott, 1961-

  Hop Alley : a novel / Scott Phillips.

  pages cm

  1.Murder—Investigation—Fiction.I. Title.

  PS3566.H515H88 2014

  813’.54—dc23

  2013043962

  ISBN 978-1-61902-379-6

  Cover design by Michael Fusco

  Interior design by Domini Dragoone

  COUNTERPOINT

  1919 Fifth Street

  Berkeley, CA 94710

  www.counterpointpress.com

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  10987654321

  FOR CORT McMEEL

  CONTENTS

  Prologue: Omaha, Nebraska, November 1873

  Four Years Later

  One: Denver, Colorado, March 1878

  Two: The Origin of the World

  Three: Cut Down by a Lady

  Four: Skullduggery!

  Five: An Earlier, Equally Ill-Conceived Proposition

  Six: Hop Alley Aflame

  Seven: Hop Alley, Laid Waste and Captured on Glass

  Eight: A Brief Sojourn in the Hoosegow

  Nine: An Angel’s Ministrations

  Ten: Exeunt, Pursued by a Bear

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  PROLOGUE

  OMAHA, NEBRASKA, NOVEMBER 1873

  Maggie was unhappy. Six months with me in the wilderness—proverbial but also, too often, literal—had sapped the joy from her, that delightful esprit that had attracted me to her as much as her considerable physical charms. As disastrous and miserable as the summer and fall of 1873 had been, the coming winter augured still worse, and as the weather had begun growing cooler Maggie’s normally garrulous and cheerful disposition curdled into an ominous silence, which I feared would end with her walking out on me to take her chances elsewhere.

  It was my fault that we had been living in such a rude and penurious manner, crisscrossing the plains and stopping in towns too new or poor to have a permanent photographer, there making stereographic pictures of those few residents who could afford such a luxurious memento. Few of these towns had a boarding house suitable for a woman’s custom, and many was the night we slept in a canvas tent camped along a river; we considered ourselves very fortunate when we occasionally obtained permission to sleep in a hayloft stinking of horse piss, bare planks bespeckled with swallow shit.

  I knew, too, that she missed the company of other women, for the towns we visited were largely populated by males of the sort who wander the western areas of our country looking for opportunity; seeing Maggie’s reaction to these villages I understood that they were unlikely, barring some fantastic stroke of good fortune, to attract many of the softer sex.

  AND SO WHEN we arrived at the city of Omaha, Nebraska, I thought to regain some of her favor by checking into the Cozzens House hotel, which was reputed to be the finest in the middle of the nation, despite the town’s reputation for roughness, violence, and general squalor. Viewed from a purely economic standpoint this was not the wisest course of action open to me, but I hoped Maggie’s spirits would revive once she’d tasted a bit of the vie de luxe away from which I’d spirited her.

  As I signed the guest ledger in a lobby whose opulence verged on vulgarity I asked the clerk where I could securely store a wagon loaded with photographic equipment and chemicals. He sniffed before each sentence he spoke, as though an air of imperiousness might counteract his hickish demeanor.

  “You can store it where you stable your animal, sir,” he said. “Burwick’s livery is across the street and they’ll lock it away real tight for you.”

  “Pardon me, sir,” said a small, portly man standing nearby as I walked away from the desk holding the room key. He wore a well-cut suit of gabardine, and he spoke so quietly that it was necessary to lean in closely to understand what he was saying. This, I surmised, was due to embarrassment over his pronounced lisp.

  “I don’t mean to eavesdrop, but am I to understand that I am addressing a member of the photographic profession?”

  “You are,” I said.

  “My name is Daniel B. Silas. I am an attorney-at-law, and it happens that I have a client who’s in need of a good photographer. You are staying only for the night, or could you be persuaded to stay in our city for a day or two?”

  My head was cocked at quite an angle trying to understand him, and at first I heard “city” as “shitty,” but I maintained my poise and didn’t snicker. “Our plan was to depart in the morning,” I said, trying to appear casually disinterested but in fact overjoyed at the prospect of recouping what this extravagant interlude was draining from our meager savings. “I would have assumed that a town of this size was full of photographic studios.”

  “Yes, sir, it is.” He looked around the lobby as though afraid he’d be overheard saying something incriminating, which piqued my interest further. “None of them will take this job. On moral grounds.”

  “Aha,” I said. “I understand. That’s not something I’d be willing to risk, either. In any event the world is already full of ‘girlie’ photographs.” I had no moral objections to dirty pictures, certainly—I had after all taken a few, purely for my own pleasure, back in Kansas—but I didn’t wish to run the risk of having them confiscated, thereby drawing attention to myself.

  I had shocked him, and he hastened to correct my misapprehension. “Oh, no, sir, you mistake my intent. What this gentleman wants isn’t anything objectionable. His problem is the local fellows either think it’s buncombe or they can’t make it happen.”

  “Can’t make what happen?”

  He looked around, as though someone unseen might be listening, then leaned in just as I was doing.

  “Make the spirits of the dead appear,” he whispered, his eyes widening for effect. “On a wet plate.”

  Of course it was buncombe, of the purest and most foolish kind, but if there was money in it, I was hardly in a position to turn it down. I’d never made a spirit photograph before but the gist of it was simple double exposure, and the examples I’d seen of the genre seemed either inartistic or unconvincing or both, and I loved a challenge.

  “Oh, I can make them appear. Tell me, who’s this gentleman?”

  THAT NIGHT MAGGIE and I ate in the hotel dining room, she dressed in the one fine gown that remained to her and the only jewels she hadn’t sold during our flight from Kansas and I wearing my least shabby suit. I looked perfectly unworthy of her company and was aware that the waiter’s eyebrow was raised in condescension aimed at only me.

  Maggie appeared completely unaware of it, however, and lapped at her lobster bisque and dissected her roast pheasant as calmly as if she still ate that way every night. She radiated a great relief, however, at this temporary restoration of her social station, and I brought up the possibility that we might spend another night there.

  “That would be lovely, Bill,” she said, seemingly unconcerned about the cost, and then the headwaiter brought over the carte des desserts, at which point we dismissed the topic.

  THAT NIGHT, AS I lay abed staring at the finely wrought plasterwork on the ceiling, all my physical wants having been satisfied, M
aggie spoke to me in a measured tone I had heard her use with her husband, on those occasions where she wanted it to appear that she was merely making a suggestion, whereas in fact she was making a nonnegotiable demand.

  “It’s awfully nice to lie in a proper bed, Bill.” Here I knew I was due for trouble, for she’d pointedly never complained about the hardships of a mostly outdoor existence, and I’d known for weeks that she longed to furnish me with a litany of grievances, legitimate ones in her case, for she was a city girl and a fancy one at that. “Don’t think it hasn’t been a fine adventure, parts of it, anyway. Until June I’d never spent a night of my life under the stars, and it was lovely for a while, but I’ll drown myself before I’ll spend the winter in a tent.”

  “Naturally when winter comes we’ll go south where it’s temperate.”

  “I won’t. I want to go to Greeley and rent a house.”

  I winced a bit at the mention of the name. She had read about the Greeley Colony in the Colorado Territory, a utopian community whose aims appealed mightily to her; I found them inane and impractical. Maggie was, however, a woman of varied, eccentric, and passionate enthusiasms, spiritualism having briefly been one of those, and as these had a way of passing quickly I had hoped she’d abandon the idea of settling in Greeley. It did occur to me now that it was likely filled with the sort of people who might pay money for photographs of the spectral representations of their departed dear ones.

  “We don’t know if they have need of a photographer,” I said, not bothering to mention my other erstwhile occupation, saloonkeep, since such a job was nonexistent in teetotal Greeley.

  “It doesn’t matter, Bill, they’ll find something for you. You’ve farmed before.”

  Not for long, I hadn’t. I loathed farming more than I’d hated being in the army. But she was right; we had to land somewhere eventually, and she wasn’t made for the rough life of a transient peddler. “All right,” I said, “we’ll head down there as soon as we quit Omaha.”

  THE NEXT DAY, shortly before midday, I set out for the estate of Colonel Joshua Cudahy with the photographic wagon, pulled by my very tired, very old, uncomplaining paint, Brutus. Every mile or so he’d utter a grunt and drop a road apple, and for the time of year it was not an unpleasant ride.

  Shortly after midday I arrived. The estate was near Bellevue, some nine miles to the south of the city, the house at its center designed in the geographically inappropriate manner of a neoclassical antebellum plantation house. Its exterior, at least, had fallen into considerable disrepair. Upon several loud administrations of the door knocker—iron, and in the shape of a lion’s head—I was greeted at the door by a silent, elderly butler wearing a frayed morning coat and an expression of deep puzzlement. Handing him my card I told him I was expected, and he disappeared into the house without speaking, shutting the door in my face.

  There was no other habitation within a mile in any direction. The grounds were sumptuously wooded, and I thought it would be a good spot to put up a new house, though the one that stood now was an eyesore. I didn’t guess it to be more than thirty or forty years old, but the aura of irreversible decay that clung to it gave it the feel of a much older ruin. The boards of the roof of the porch needed whitewashing, the windows were dirty and in several cases cracked, and the oaken Corinthian columns were cracked vertically on the concave portions of its striations and doubtless ready to collapse; still, this had plainly once been an opulent place. I saw the smoldering ruins of such a house in Georgia at the end of the war.

  I understood Colonel Cudahy to have been a fur trader with some past association with Mr. John Jacob Astor, and it surprised me that no local photographer had both the skills and low moral character necessary to cheat so rich a man. Whether the current condition of the premises was due to an old man’s neglectfulness or to a reduction in station, he had plainly been at one time a man of considerable means.

  The butler reappeared and gestured for me to enter, again without speech, and I entered a vast, gloomy foyer in which stood a grizzly, rising up on its hind legs, mouth agape, forelegs poised to swat the viewer into the next world. Like the house and butler the bear was rapidly rotting, claws splintering, one glass eye gone altogether and the other cloudy, fur worn to bare, leathery skin in patches, the taxidermist’s understructure showing in others.

  “I shot her myself in ’42, on the Platte. Would have finished me had I misfired. Left her cubs on the side of the river to die. Felt a little sorry for that later.”

  The voice startled me, coming from behind, high in pitch and rustic in tone, and with the considerable volume customary with the newly hard of hearing. I spun on my heels to find myself addressing a man who almost looked capable of felling such a beast barehanded. Dressed in a badly worn-down buckskin suit, he had quite a splendid head of silver hair that he wore swept back and down to the shoulder, and even slightly stooped as he was he must have topped six feet three inches. His eyes, black and staring intently from beneath a pair of bushily simian brows, called to mind Brady’s photograph of John C. Calhoun, perhaps the most frightening-looking statesman America has yet produced.

  “I’m Bill Sadlaw,” I said, holding out my right hand, which he ignored. I hadn’t gotten used to the name yet, and I still felt every time I said it that I’d be caught out as a liar, but Cudahy took right to it.

  “Sadlaw. I knew a Sadlaw in Canada, about ’26, ’27. Cheated his partner out of about a hundred pounds’ worth of beaver pelt, sold it to some Iroquois who moved it along to the French. Partner, name of Harlick, sawed off this Sadlaw’s head, stuck it on a pole outside their camp as a warning. The one time I saw it it was pretty rotten, just a skull with hair sticking to it, and I asked Harlick what he was warning of. ‘Tom Harlick’s sawblade,’ was his answer. Don’t suppose that’s any kin of yours.”

  “No, sir,” I said. “I don’t believe any of us ever made that far north.”

  “Well, sir, Dan Silas come by this morning and told me you could conjure a phantom onto glass. Is that so?”

  “I have done,” I said, “but I’m curious as to why you don’t have a local man do it.”

  “Three told me it was chicanery. A fourth tried to prove them right by stealing a tintype of my Letitia and placing a copy onto the background of a picture of me. Don’t know how it was done but it were such a patent fake I beat him within an inch of his death and wrecked his studio, smashed his camera and lenses and whatnot, and then saw to it that he made his way out of the state of Nebraska.”

  I nodded in a sage manner, only slightly more trepidatious about my plan to try and fool the old goat. “Rightly so,” I said.

  “Then there were three others who made attempts but captured nothing.”

  “Have you attempted a medium?”

  He laughed, and it sounded like a three-hundred-pound hog snorting over its dinner. “Table knockers and seers! Buncombe. I want photographic proof.” He lowered his voice. “I hear her, you see? All the time. And her gone fifteen years now. But I can’t prove it’s her, can’t prove I’m not bereft of my reason.”

  “She speaks to you?” His own tentative autodiagnosis of non compos mentis seemed a plausible one to me.

  “Whispers. And I hear doors closing, drawers being opened.”

  I found myself shouting at him just to match his considerable volume, and I wondered how whispering Dan Silas made himself understood to his client. “Your butler? Does he hear her too?”

  “He’s deaf as a plank,” the Colonel shouted, waving his hand across his face, and I wondered if the bellowing wasn’t out of sheer habit.

  There was an element of risk in this, certainly, but I felt sure that the previous fraudster had been undone by a lack of artistry and technical finesse. “Now, Colonel, I should tell you that I’m currently working with a stereoscopic camera.”

  “I’ve nothing against it. Hell, seems to me that would make it well-nigh impossible for you to falsify such a thing.”

  That wasn’t the case
at all but I nodded my agreement. “I don’t see how one could.”

  I HIED TO the wagon, fed Brutus a lump of sugar from my hand, and took down my tripod and the case containing the camera. Once I had them in the house I returned to fetch my plates and chemicals, and by the time I had coated the plates with collodion the Colonel had already changed into a black wool suit and cravat twenty years out of fashion. “Was this a suit you owned when Mrs. Cudahy was still living?” I asked in a moment of inspiration.

  He looked down at it as if to remind himself of which suit he’d just donned. “Seems to me it was,” he said.

  “Good, that often helps, having objects familiar to the deceased,” I said, thinking myself clever for inventing spiritualist lore on the spot.

  I set him up in the brightest room on the first floor, the parlor, which featured a large picture window with a thin white curtain that diffused the daylight nicely. He was seated in a chair upholstered in crushed green velour, the least worn piece of furniture I’d seen so far, and he had such an air of dignified antiquity that I felt a certain revulsion at the fact that I was cheating him. Then I reminded myself, as any number of other phony spiritualists must have done, that I was comforting him with proof that his wife’s love for him had survived death.

  “WILL YOU RETURN tomorrow with the finished pictures?” he asked when the sitting was finished.

  “I will, regardless of the outcome. You do understand we may be disappointed by the results,” I said, hoping that I wouldn’t lose my nerve, and also that my skills would prove equal to the task at hand.

  He handed me a fifty-cent piece, at which I raised an eyebrow, hoping that he didn’t think that my fee would be so cheap, but I’d misunderstood. “Come ’round about sunset. And when ye return, do me a favor and bring me back two pounds of salt, ground, would ye?”

  “Certainly,” I said, perfectly incurious as to his motive, and took my leave.

  I HASTENED IN the wagon back to Omaha, though all the chemicals and equipment necessary for developing and printing the plates were in my wagon. It was well that the old bird hadn’t had his picture made since the days of tintypes, because if I’d had to show him the results as they were I’d have had to declare failure. The greater part of my labors would be performed in Omaha, at the hotel.